Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay

Dexter is still engaged to his girfriend Rita, and now his co-workers have found out about it and are throwing Dexter an engagement party. But Dex has bigger fish-problems to fry in this third installment of the Dexter series by writer Jeff Lindsay.

Dexter is called to a murder scene where the heads of the two murder victims have been cut off and replaced by the heads of plaster bulls. Dexter would ordinarily find this an interesting challenge, but instead, he feels a silence inside him from where his Dark Passenger ordinarily rides, something he finds troubling.

Even more troubling is the realization later on that something has caused Dexter's IT, also known as the Dark Passenger, to flee him. Dex is suddenly crippled without the confidence and dark knowledge that his Dark Passenger imparted to him, and his attempts to continue in the "Rules of Harry" are thwarted without the confidence and knowledge he is suddenly denied.

Desperate to find out what was so disturbing as to make his Dark Passenger flee, Dexter must discover what the Bull Heads mean, and finds out that they are connected to the cult of Moloch in Babylonia, and that his Dark Passenger may not have been a part of him as he always thought, but a supernatural rider-along who is actually a child of Moloch. Moloch himself is inimical to his own children because they attempted to overthrow him many years ago. He killed most of them, and the rest fled, including the one who was Dexter's Dark Passenger.

Now, the cult of Moloch has their eyes on Dexter as he struggles to stop them when they turn their eyes on Cody and Astor, Rita's children, who are Damaged in the same way as Dexter. Dexter can hardly turn them in, but are they ready to follow the Rules of Harry? And will Dexter ever regain that missing piece of himself, or will he be doomed to a life of relentless mediocrity and pain without it?

Wow, just when I thought things couldn't get any better (or worse) for Dexter, life decides to crap all over him by taking away the things that make Dexter himself. In this book, Dexter is both enlarged and diminished. Enlarged in that he's finally decided to teach Cody and Astor the rules of Harry, and diminished in that he's missing his Dark Passenger, the part of him that makes him such a successful serial killer.

Harry can still kill without the Dark Passenger, but without it, he's at first unable to. Only by working with the emotions he no longer thought he had is he able to somewhat recover, but it's not a good fit. And the whole supernatural explanation for his Dark Passenger was an unwelcome addition to the book and the series as a whole. The first two books gave no such supernatural clue or explanation for Dexter's abilities, and while the lack of such made for an interesting storyline, I don't think that the series needed such an explanation for Dexter's ability as a serial killer.

Do all serial killers have such a spirit inside them, or are there other explanations for why serial killers arise with such prevalence in the US? If all serial killers have this spirit inside them, is Dexter merely redistributing them when he takes out another serial killer? (i.e. does the spirit merely move on, or is it killed, too?) or are other serial killers merely a psychological problem? The whole supernatural stuff just raises far more questions than it answers, and creates more of a problem for the writer. Mainly, these questions aren't answered in the novel.

This is also the only Dexter novel (so far) where the story isn't told completely from Dexter's own perspective. Therefore, it feels narratively different from other Dexter books as well. I will recommend this book, but I hope Jeff Lindsay drops the whole "Serial Killers are the children of a Babylonian God" thing as quickly as possible. It doesn't enhance the story, and I found the whole plotline to be bogus. Recommended, but with a caveat.